June 28, 2024 marks the 55th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, commemorating the day patrons of a New York gay bar, the Stonewall Inn, fought back against a violent and discriminatory police raid before taking it to the streets for a five-day revolt.
Stonewall was known as a haven for the most marginalized in our community - trans and gender nonconforming people, homeless youth, sex workers, and people of color; people who faced overpolicing and incarceration in every aspect of their lives; people to whom the provisional and largely factious sense of safety provided by wealth, white privilege, and passing privilege was not available. It is not a coincidence that the spark of the modern LGBTQ+ rights movement was lit by people - including Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson, the eventual founders of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), which provided support and housing to unhoused LGBT sex workers and youths - who understood that the “American dream” was an empty promise that had nothing to offer them, and that taking action was the only way to make change.
During Pride Month, you’ll see some corporations are still putting rainbows in their logo and little else. At New Coyote Consulting, our core team - CEO Marina Martinez-Bateman and COO Kate Tedrow - is non-binary and/or queer, and so are the majority of our contractors, clients, and community members. Pride is every day for us, and it’s not just a feeling - it’s an action.
We prioritize clients who are transgender or gender nonconforming people and Black, Indigenous or other people of color, especially those who have recently come into their power. We work only with organizations that share our values of queer liberation - if not as their primary mission, then as part of their understanding that, as the great Fannie Lou Hamer put it, “nobody’s free until everybody’s free.” Every day, we work to raise up LGBTQIA+ leaders and help their voices be heard, supporting the labor of organizations that alleviate the harms and counter the toxic narratives of patriarchal white supremacist ideology that seeks to silence and obliterate our diverse community.
At a time when corporations are scaling back their Pride campaigns in a flawed attempt to appeal to those who don’t want us to exist at all, it’s important to remember that the wealth-extracting machines of capitalism were never on our side, even when they were taking our money. Being able to buy a shirt with a rainbow flag on it may feel like a triumph, as if we should be grateful that these “prestigious brands,” many of them only successful because of their exploitation of others, would want to be seen in our colors. But their performance of allyship was only ever a cash grab and a marketing trend. And trends change.
When corporations pull back from the LGBTQIA+ community, it is a painful reminder that the cultural, political and economic forces who’d rather we disappear are powerful, and they don’t stop at the checkout line. It’s also a necessary reminder that Pride can’t be sold in a store. It’s here with us, in the way we show up for each other and for other oppressed groups. It’s in the way we live our lives, outside of oppressive structures including white supremacy and capitalism.
Queerness is inherently liberatory, and our liberation is tied to the liberation of the factory workers whose fingers bleed as they sew garments with little rainbow flags, and the cashiers whose wages are stolen by being forced to work unpaid overtime. It is tied to Palestinian liberation, prison abolition, disability justice, and racial justice. It’s tied to our siblings in the Congo mining coltan at gunpoint so we can have the newest devices to distract us from the consequences of overproduction and planned obsolescence.
As the people who are born outside of the enforced status quo, who can not and will not live lives prescribed to us by the same institutions that enforce colonization and capitalism world-wide, we know that our queerness is a gift and an opportunity to find alternatives to the acceptable level of constant unhappiness and stress we’ve been trained to inhabit. Capitalism has never truly made anything “for us” - it’s up to us to create the world we want to see.